She stands at the bottom, a brightness in the common room. She makes the gray slab walls, the deflating beanbags, and the sagging navy couches fade away. There is only my mother wearing sunshine-colored paisley: orange, yellow, gold. Her hair has grown out longer, falling way past her collarbones and over her small breasts. Her face is tipped up to mine and smiling.
I leap at her from the last two stairs, right into her arms.
She says, “Oof,” and she is laughing.
She spins me and her dark hair swings around us, her skirt wraps my legs.
It doesn’t matter that her body feels different, softer and spongier around her middle. It doesn’t matter that she smells different, too, the acrid stench of cigarettes over cheap shampoo. Her arms are still her arms. Her crying eyes on me are still her eyes, even spilling tears.
“You’re so pretty! You’re so pretty!” she keeps saying. “You’re so tall!”
There is nothing that can touch me in this moment. Nothing. Mrs. Mack leaves without me noticing, like she’s been teleported from the room.
Kai’s brought a Tupperware with her, and it’s banging me in the back as we hug and clasp and almost dance together. It’s the pancakes, the ones with orange rind in the batter. They are cold, and the syrup has soaked through and made them soggy. The butter has congealed. We sit side by side on the navy loveseat and eat them with our fingers anyway. Kai can’t stop touching me. Can’t keep her syrup-sticky fingers off my face, my hair. She’s quiet, but I whisper and plan for both of us, talking with my mouth full. Not about the past, or even much the now. Today I only talk about our brightest nexts, and she leans in, rapt. I am the storyteller now, telling her a future that is half pretend, half hope, certain and glorious. Kai can’t stop crying and smiling. Tears leak the whole time, but it is sweet, for all that. The sweetest hours that I have known in literally years.
Time has never moved so fast. I want to slow it, make it stop, stay here in the common room with some old cartoon running silent on the shared TV and Kai’s long leg pressed against my own.
“I’ll be back for dinner Monday night, remember,” Kai says, feeling it, too. “And then again on Wednesday, and again, and again, until one day very soon, I’ll take you home.”
I beam at her, and past her, I spot Candace. She has crept out to crouch at the top of the stairs with her shoulders in a hunch. Her chin rests on her knees, and she peers down at us. Her eyes shine as pale and blue as any bitter winter. In that glance, I feel joy teeter on the cusp of ruin. I see the end of everything.
It was perhaps three seconds of my life, that look. Then Candace crab-walked backward, out of sight, and I turned back to Kai. But that moment when our eyes met, it stayed with me.
I learned in that span how certain time is. It marched forward always, with me in it. Sometimes it dragged, sometimes it flew far too fast, but it was always moving. It would always move, inexorable, until it brought me to the word, the bullet, the breath that ended it.
It brought me to this alleyway. To Oakleigh’s husband.
I stared into that small black hole, and Clark’s pupils behind it were two more small black holes, exactly the same. All three held the promise of a crazy blankness. His hand shook and tightened, time so slow that I could see the flex of every tiny muscle in his fingers. The light glinted off the blond hairs on his hand. They were like live filaments, electric, and so beautiful.
All I could say was “Wait, wait,” in that futile way that people do. Wanting one more second.
He waited.
Clark was a gym body, with civilized white teeth. He’d been pushed beyond his edge, but he was new to violence. He hesitated, and I had time for one more thing.
In this brief stay, I could say Wait again, or Please, or No, but it wouldn’t stop him. I could see this wasn’t personal. He didn’t care that I would not find Hana. That I would not be there to watch over Julian. That I’d never tell Birdwine that here, inside the gun’s dark eye, I saw his flaws and all his failures clearly, and knew they did not change how dear he was to me, how necessary, good, and worthy.
Clark had fallen over some edge or another. He was tumbling, and I could not call him back with the concerns of my inconsequential life, or make him see the fine web of connections he was cutting. I wasn’t real to him. Another debt I owed to Candace, this clarity: his acts against me had nothing to do with me, and any sentence of my story was only that—a story. So in the small space of his hesitation, I forgot myself, and told a piece of his: “Oakleigh’s got something on you.”
His chin dipped down, and I had bought another breath, though the tension in his finger on the trigger did not abate. The gun’s black eye looked into my left eye, exactly. I tried to see past it, see him, but it was so hard. So hard to look at anything but that silly, silvery gun.
“What?” he said, as if he hadn’t heard me right.
“She has something that will ruin you.”
The tension in the finger eased. His neck elongated. I had his interest.
“Tell me,” he said, “or I am going to shoot you.”